Friends of Chamber Music hosts the Czech Republic's Pavel Haas Quartet, March 16

Works by Dvořák, Martinů, and Korngold are on the program for the Vancouver Playhouse matinee

By emily lyth

Pavel Haas Quartet. Photo by Petra Hajská

Friends of Chamber Music presents the Pavel Haas Quartet at the Vancouver Playhouse on March 16 at 3 pm

SINCE WINNING ITALY’S Premio Paolo Borciani international string quartet competition in 2005, the Pavel Haas Quartet has had a successful two decades of music-making.

Composed of violinists Veronika Jarůšková and Marek Zwiebel, violist Šimon Truszka, and cellist Peter Jarůšek, the Prague-based group has performed in many of the world’s most esteemed venues, including London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and Seoul’s LG Arts Center.

The quartet has won a total of five Gramophone Classical Music Awards over the years for its recordings of works by Dvořák, Smetana, Schubert, Janáček, and Haas. Most notably, a release of Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 in F major and String Quartet No. 13 in G major received the coveted Gramophone Recording of the Year prize in 2011.

The musicians have also been in residence at the Dvořák Prague Festival since 2022. It’s only fitting, then, that they will play one of the Czech composer’s most ambitious outputs in an upcoming Friends of Chamber Music concert: his String Quartet No. 11 in C major. Composed in 1881, the piece was initially dismissed as a “weak work” by Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster and Hellmesberger Quartet violinist Joseph Hellmesberger. But when the Joachim Quartet premiered it a year later in Berlin, it solidified its value as a work that embraced Viennese tradition rather than the Slavic melodies that were expected of Dvořák.

More pieces on the program for the Pavel Haas Quartet’s Vancouver Playhouse matinee on March 16 include Martinů’s String Quartet No. 3 and Korngold’s String Quartet No. 2, which the Austrian composer wrote in 1933, just before moving to L.A. and making a name for himself as one of the founding composers of Hollywood film music.  

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